Amidst the many examples of virtuoso finger drumming and pad performance on YouTube, here’s a potentially-inspiring jam produced by artist Teezva for Vestax. We must have missed this video in the NAMM deluge of last year, but it perhaps remains worth posting. It’s doubly so, as I still haven’t seen any of Vestax’s PAD-One hardware in the wild. (PAD-Ones, if you’re reading, come say hello!)

One interesting element of the performance is that Teezva seems effortlessly between triggering clips and loops and individual one-shots. Many performances I see tend to focus on one or the other, but compositionally, that provides more flexibility.

Just keep tapping those fingers to keep your dexterity up.

Via Beatnick audio, another live take with Teezva, in which he also talks a bit about what he’s doing. (And yes, he really can replicate this performance, lest you thought the above video was the result of umpteen takes.)

Here’s the PAD-One, looking for all the world like a KORG padKONTROL and a nano series had a love child:

One of the things I loved about using buttons or pads with ableton is the variety of clip launch options that live provides and are often overlooked. I put up a video of a song of mine recently where I combine one shots, loops, momentary clips, and rows of mlr-style follow action loops here:

This makes my fingers hurt just looking at it … but then, I'm over 60. I don't like pounding on things with my fingers anymore. On a more serious note, it doesn't appear that the drum samples are responding to velocity, which is okay for the style of the music but possibly a limiting factor for this type of instrument.

Another minor point: 12 pads are not a huge kit. I see he has two in the 2nd video. Me, I have a 61-note MIDI keyboard here, which is equivalent to five of these gizmos. Well, not including the X/Y controller pads and the blinky lights.

http://burialape.com peter

Wait.. do the specs imply a real midi cable output???

Jamsire Ernoir

Packaged food. Not for me.

http://herringson.com dylan

I've got one of these, it does have a real midi output. The output on the hardware is like an S-video plug but you get a cable that takes this to a normal 5 pin DIN so you could use it with midi hardware without a computer.

Swissgear backpack

SwissGear Backpack It's good that they have thought about that. It was about time they did something. Thanks for sharing.

http://zeroreference.blogspot.com zeroreference

Interesting. Makes me think of what makes a virtuoso – the possibility for extraordinary expressiveness on the instrument. Pad-mashing, as some call it, clearly takes skill, but – compared to the skills of a drum(kit) virtuoso? I'm not aiming to knock anything here…..I'm excited to see more expressiveness come into electronic performance. In addition to the padmashing, the virtuoso clearly exercises some technique in advance, in their selection of samples. There is also the XY pad, which from a performance perspective opens up a LOT of possibility…..but sadly we didn't get to see Teebs throw down on some XY pad caressing, padmashing madness. Seems like if you threw a tilt sensor into one of these guys it'd be raw.

Ranch

give a drummer a octapad and this would be a little more exciting. i just dont get the finger drumming thing. get a drumset and trigger some samples. much more entertaining than pushing buttons.

akrylik

I dont see how this is drumming.

I see that some techniques are borrowed from drumming here, such as the temporal backing grid provided by a hihat-like sound but compositionally its very different, right? The range of timbre and sound texture is just about infinite when compared to the drums or keyboard (even if its a synthesizer you expect the sound for an A# to be related to the sound for G). So each song is an exercise in making the proper sonic choices and then mapping it to your instrument. This mapping step is what these grids of buttons are good at. Drums and keyboards are pretty poor when you need to map harmonically related versions of sample, next to a cadre of rhythmic one-shots mixed with a few backing loops and so on. The arrangement on the controller probably follows functional rules (as in a sound's role in the song) rather than melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic rules.

Whenever watch a serious turntablist I can't help but believe that some really powerful and deep performances will be unlocked once we get this physical interface problem even 50% solved.

MegaTonne

ha, as product demonstrations go the 2nd video is fail.

he set two up, awkwardly, to give him a 4×4 grid. thus suggesting the 6×2 formation is whack.

DOH!, surely one of his Vestax liasons should have told him

http://helenearthband.com emergencyofstate

While I can appreciate his skill at "finger drumming" it still comes down to how it sounds to me…

and the way it sounds to me is both lacking groove and out of tempo.

Gitaruman

Yeah, it's cool, but all I can hear is how sloppy all the fills are. Really loose timing. I like the beat but kept thinking that this would sound so much better with a drummer who is in the pocket.